Anthology!

Oh wow - some of my poems were accepted for inclusion in an anthology! It's called the Outside Voices 2008 Anthology of Younger Poets. There are some poets whose work I really respect on their roster, including some of my classmates from Emerson who I always thought were really talented. I don't know which of the poems I submitted they accepted, but I don't care - I just appreciate it.

One of the poems I submitted was "Like hermit crabs to sea", that I posted back in August. I also submitted a remix of that poems plus a few others. I'll put them here, why not?




FLOCK OF ME

As I lie napping, you draw back
the curtain of my shirt and pick
the lock to open the door to

an enormous room filled
with all manner of flapping bird
instead of a meaty heart.

Guinea hens call their young
with a metallic screech, and chickens cluck
and lay down rules that none follow.

What you have been taking for words
are just chattering and ruffling and squawks,
but it doesn’t mean I don’t love you.

I offer you this flock of birds
always pecking at each other
and up to a whole heap of racket.




IN MEMORIAM, RUSSELL JONES, THE O.D.B., 1970-2004
If a brick didn’t know how to sit on walls no mo’, what would you aks it?

If a yellow wing fell from the roof but no canary…
If a bullet miss me and go home to watch cable…
If a bottle of Olde English could recite Beowulf fables…
If a page wandered streets jonesing for a library…
If a weave snuck out hair by hair leaving confettis…
If a hand slapped itself and sounded like fingers hitting air…
If a tree fell in the yard and you didn’t know how it got there…
If a five dollar bill you lost came back with a broke-wheel Mercedes…
If a lizard jump out my pocket to build a gold-rim cage…
If a arrow sat by itself without no bow in the dirt…
If I give a shout-out to the Eskimos but they don’t send a ounce…
If the letters from a book break loose and hop off the page…
If a house go to sleep on Pluto then wake up back on Earth…
If my food stamp bounce…




ISLAND IN THE SKY

Grant me hope, dirt,
you who have always bridged
my every destination.
I have short hair now;
I cut it when the moon hides
in its dark dreams and faces away,
smoked to blackness.

A dirge – men shout, cars roll
through dust, their hands seem truly gray.
The penned earth grows arid;
the loam dries there beneath concrete.
Soon, it will act: the earth,
the deepened land, has slid shut.

Paths merge in the gloaming;
pine needles bake on the land.
The ports have opened,
men in hair shirts make for an island,
They’re hoping to cross
the clear sheet of water
to a new earth,
bare of dreams or hedges,
where the man in the moon is a boar.
This new land, opened, huge sheets
of sunlight strike straight to my heart.
I drink until my body aches.

Shout to earth, it has opened.
Fair moon, bride to dreams,
claim-spikes lie in her soil.
Forget the ones who sank to that blue land
intact. They will foam and roll over
all the earth. Their seaweed hair
will be a bridge, a bridge of dreams
while others dare shout at busy hands,
smoked skies, doom. Jump to this earth.




LIKE HERMIT CRABS TO SEA (REMIX)

I have lost the language of dreams, the filter
of words that clung to my ear as you whispered
by my side. Their letters slide on the floor
with carefully separated crumbs of cereal.

Jumping like fleas: frenetic, sneaking, jumbled –
they’ve broken themselves; they look amused
by their own frailty. I hear scratching noises;
consonants with little winged feet

against cold tile squares; as my eyes adjust I try
to reunite the fuckers – they’re slithery,
uniformly mercurial, alarming
in a new way, they have taken to life.

I have not been successful without you, who took
part in whispering away my hands and ears.
They were deficient: I tested them and the letters
decided on new words to mean.

If you don’t know dreams, you can go crazy
in that direction. I can only wait
to be with you again in some waking world.
The words of dreams do not have any letters,

but they will follow paths strewn with letters
like hermit crabs to sea. That type of devotion
freezes my voice. I will let them push and refer
to others, yet to come, balancing themselves

as stairs clack from being hit by rolling shells
from above, approaching but never breaking.
That will calm them; they will find their own way,
the way things floating learn the ocean.